Only the Narrative is True 2

In It's All True by Carmen Stephan the endless summer only lasts a moment. If only he hadn’t died … But Jacaré, the fisherman from north-eastern Brazil, disappears right at the beginning into the ocean waves. Carmen Stephan narrates the story of a long-lost film by Orson Welles. Its title was It's All True...

In It's All True by Carmen Stephan the endless summer only lasts a moment. If only he hadn’t died … But Jacaré, the fisherman from north-eastern Brazil, disappears right at the beginning into the ocean waves. Carmen Stephan narrates the story of a long-lost film by Orson Welles. Its title was It's All True. Welles tells the story of four fishermen who in 1941 spent 61 days on a small raft (jangadas) and sailed from Fortaleza to Rio to present the president with their complaints. The feat was a success and the four fishermen, including Jacaré, returned home as heroes. It was worth standing up, instead of always ducking out of sight.

Faraway in California, Orson Welles read the news about the incident. The story fascinated him and he wanted to make a docu-film about it: “I want you to do it exactly as it was”, he said. But right at the start of shooting the film the main protagonist, Jacaré, was caught by a big wave and pulled overboard. Orson Welles still shot the film with Jacaré’s brother in the starring role – Jacaré only appears again at the end of the film in one of the scenes that had been filmed first.

It's All True – available on the Internet at “Four men on a raft” – is an impressive film in which the adventure is narrated again with intense light and shadow effects, with ingenious ideas and magnificent shots of the rugged faces of the fishermen. It's All True – but what exactly is the truth? Orson Welles will pose the question again later in F for Fake. The truth is not real, answers Carmen Stephan for him: “The truth was deeper. It had a foundation.” In calm, almost tender prose, she meticulously narrates the story of the courageous fisherman Jacaré, of the eternal child Orson Welles and the poverty of the jagandeiros in north-eastern Brazil. The author not only precisely reviewed the long-lost film – in 1981, it was found by chance in a suitcase, as the commissioning clients wanted to lock it away. In addition to this, her sources were Orson Welles’s accounts and Jacaré’s diary. More importantly, however, she visited Jacaré’s surviving children in Brazil.

In the end, Welles no longer filmed things “exactly as it was”, says the author but “as it is”. She divined it more than she knows; and she allows such presentiments to prevail. This led to the creation of a slim, thoughtful, contemplative and sensitive work: wonderful literature. The moment when Jacaré disappeared into the waves stretches over a summer into eternity. Like Madame Nielsen, Carmen Stephan also knows that “only the narrative exists”.